Winifred Fraser

Winifred Fraser, born Winifred Day on 29 February 1868 in City Road, London, was an English actress whose career spanned more than six decades, encompassing work in the London theatre, provincial touring, and a sustained presence on the Broadway stage between 1910 and 1930. She was the daughter of the Reverend Edward Day, vicar of St Mark's Church, Shoreditch, and received her education in Hampstead. Her professional debut came in 1888, when she played Sophia Primrose in a stage adaptation of The Vicar of Wakefield, shortly after which she adopted the stage name Winifred Fraser.

Fraser's early career was built through touring and supporting work in London. She traveled with Ben Greet's company in classical repertory productions and with other companies in more contemporary works. Her London debut took place at the Criterion Theatre in November 1889, where she appeared as Alice in G. H. Dabbs's Her Own Witness. Subsequent West End engagements included Rosie in Effie Bancroft's curtain-raiser My Daughter and Lucy Lorimer in Sydney Grundy's A Pair of Spectacles alongside John Hare. In April 1892 she married the actor and manager George Rose Foss, born in 1859, with whom she had a daughter the following year. The couple separated within a decade and were presumably later divorced, as Foss remarried.

Throughout the 1890s Fraser worked under several of the most prominent figures in the London theatre, among them Greet, Olga Nethersole, E. S. Willard, and Augustus Harris. In 1900 she joined Mrs Patrick Campbell's company, playing Eileen opposite Campbell's Paula in The Second Mrs Tanqueray and appearing in the first London production of Edmond Rostand's Les Romanesques, staged under the title The Fantasticks. In 1903 she understudied Nina Boucicault in the title role of J. M. Barrie's Little Mary and subsequently made the part her own, performing it in multiple revivals at Wyndham's Theatre. In 1905 and 1906 she toured Australia with the role alongside other leading parts, and in 1907 she toured in The School for Scandal and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Fraser made her first appearance in the United States playing Barbara Pennymint in Louis N. Parker's Pomander Walk at Wallack's Theatre in New York, and over the following two years she toured the role across the country. She returned to classical material in 1913, taking the role of Good-Dedes in a production of Everyman at the New York Children's Theater. She remained in the United States throughout the First World War, establishing herself in New York in roles that called for middle-aged matrons in turn-of-the-century melodramas. Her Broadway credits during this period included Daddies and, in 1917 and 1918, nearly a year as Mrs Martha Van Zile in Polly With a Past, by George Middleton and Guy Bolton, at the Belasco Theatre.

Her post-war Broadway work continued to demonstrate her range. She appeared as Mrs Morland in Barrie's Mary Rose in 1920, as Mrs Smallwood in Arthur Pinero's The Enchanted Cottage in 1923, and as Mrs Considine in St John Ervine's Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, also in 1923. Additional Broadway credits from her years in the United States include The Captive and Stepdaughters of War. From the late 1920s Fraser maintained addresses in London, and she eventually settled in Eastbourne, Sussex. Her daughter, the actress Iris Fraser Foss, born in 1893, survived her. Fraser died in Eastbourne on 25 November 1951.